Billie Dove (May 14, 1901 – December 31, 1997) was an American actress
Dove was born Lillian Bohny to Charles and Bertha (née Kagl) Bohny, Swiss immigrants. As a teen, she worked as a model to help support her family and was hired as a teenager by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in his Ziegfeld Follies Revue. She legally changed her name to Lillian Bohny in the early 1920s. and migrated to Hollywood, where she began appearing in silent films. She soon became one of the most popular actresses of the 1920s, appearing in Douglas Fairbanks' smash hit Technicolor film The Black Pirate (1926), as Rodeo West in The Painted Angel (1929), and was dubbed The American Beauty (1927), the title of one of her films.
She married the director of her seventh film, Irvin Willat, in 1923. The two divorced in 1929. Dove had a huge legion of male fans, one of her most persistent being Howard Hughes. She shared a three-year romance with Hughes and was engaged to marry him, but she ended the relationship without ever giving cause. Hughes cast her as a comedian in his film Cock of the Air (1932). She also appeared in his movie The Age for Love (1931).
She was also a pilot, poet, and painter.
Following her last film, Blondie of the Follies (1932), Dove retired from the screen to be with her family, although she was at the time still popular. She next married oil executive Robert Kenaston in 1933, a marriage that lasted for 37 years until his death in 1973; they had a son and an adopted daughter. She later had a brief third marriage to an architect, John Miller, which ended in divorce in the 1970s.
Aside from a brief cameo in Diamond Head (1963), Dove never returned to the movies. She spent her retirement years in Rancho Mirage before moving into the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California where she died of pneumonia in 1997.
Dove has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6351 Hollywood Blvd.

Full Name at Birth

Lillian Bohny

Father

Charles Bohny

Mother

Bertha Kagl Bohny

Friend

Alice Faye, Diana Lewis-Powell

Film Role

Actor/Actress

Has Detailed Data (New)

1

Age

96

Friend

Marion Davies, Norma Talmadge, Carol Dempster, Edward S. Larson

Wikipedia Text

Billie Dove (May 14, 1903 – December 31, 1997) was an American actress.

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